Amazon, Pages, and Research
June 21, 2015
I read “What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page.” As you may know, I have complained directly and through my attorney because IDC and its wizard Dave Schubmehl sold a report containing my information on Amazon. The mid tier consulting firm pegged a $3,500 price tag on an eight page report based on my work. Well, as Jack Benny used to say. Well.
The publisher / consultant behavior annoyed me, but I do not sell my content via Amazon. I would prefer to give away a report than get tangled in the Bezos buzz saw. Sure, I buy talcum powder from the Zon, but that’s because the grocery in Harrod’s Creek does not sell any talcum powder. The Zon gets the product to me in a few days. Sometimes.
My thoughts about Amazon ramped up a notch when I read this passage in the article from The Atlantic:
Soon, the maker of the Kindle is going to flip the formula used for reimbursing some of the authors who depend on it for sales. Instead of paying these authors by the book, Amazon will soon start paying authors based on how many pages are read—not how many pages are downloaded, but how many pages are displayed on the screen long enough to be parsed. So much for the old publishing-industry cliché that it doesn’t matter how many people read your book, only how many buy it. For the many authors who publish directly through Amazon, the new model could warp the priorities of writing: A system with per-page payouts is a system that rewards cliffhangers and mysteries across all genres. It rewards anything that keeps people hooked, even if that means putting less of an emphasis on nuance and complexity.
Several observations:
- I often buy digital and hard copy books because I need access to a specific passage. I recently ordered a book about law enforcement and the Web. I was interested in two chapters and the bibliographies for this chapter. The notion of paying the author, a police professional, for only those pages I examined rubs me the wrong way. I have the book and I may need to access other chapters at a different point in time. But I want the author to be paid for this very good work. If I understand the write up, Amazon wants to move in a different direction.
- When I get a book via Amazon for my Kindle, I thought I could use the book as long as I had the device. Well. (There’s the Benny word again) I have experienced disappearing content. My wife asked me where a title was, I said, “In the archive.” Nope. The title was disappeared. Nifty. I contacted Amazon via a form and heard nothing back. Who got paid? Amazon but I no longer have the digital book. Nifty, but I probably made a mistake or at least that’s what outfits operating like Time Warner-type companies tell me. My fault.
- Amazon, like the Google, is faced with cost projections that are likely to give accountants headaches and sleepless nights. Amazon, a digital Wal-Mart type operation, is going to squeezing revenue any way possible. Someone has to pay for the Amazon phone and other Amazon adventures. Same day groceries, anyone?
Net net: No wonder the second hand book stores in Louisville, Kentucky are crowded. Physical books work the way they have for centuries, thank you. You will be able to buy my new study from the electronic store we have set up. The book will even be available in hard copy if a person wants a tangible instance. Maybe I will sell fewer copies. That’s okay. I prefer to avoid being clever and making my work available to anyone who wants to access it. None of that IDC like behavior either. $3,500 for eight pages. Crazy, right?
I often purchase fiction books, read a few pages, and then decide the book is not in my wheel house. I want the author to get paid whether I read every page or not. I think the author wants to get paid as well. The only outfit who doesn’t want to pay may be the Zon.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2015
Watson and Coffee Shops. Smart Software Needs k\More Than a Latte
June 19, 2015
I read “IBM Watson Analytics Helps Grind Big Data in Unmanned Coffee Shops.” I promised myself I would not call attention to the wild and wonderful Watson public relations efforts. But coffee shops?
The main idea is that:
IBM has worked with Revive Vending to create systems for unmanned coffee shops that tap into the cognitive computing technology of Watson Analytics for data analysis.
Note the verb: past tense. I would have preferred “is working” but presumably Watson is not longer sipping its latte at Revive.
According to the article:
IBM’s cloud-powered analytics service is used to crunch the vending machine data and form a picture of customers. Summerill [a Revive executive] explained that Watson Analytics allows Honest Café to understand which customers sit and have a drink with friends, and which ones dash in to grab a quick coffee while on the move. Transactional data is analyzed to see how people pay for their food and drinks at certain times of the day so that Honest Café can automatically offer relevant promotions and products to individual customers.
The write up also includes a balling statement from my pals at IDC, the outfit which sold my content without my permission on Amazon courtesy of the wizard Dave Schubmehl:
Miya Knights, senior research analyst at IDC, said that the mass of data generated by retailers through networked systems that cover retail activity can be used to support increasingly complex and sophisticated customer interactions.
Okay, but don’t point of sale systems (whether manual or automated) track these data? With a small operation, why not use what’s provided by the POS vendor?
The answer to the question is that IBM is chasing demo customers even to small coffee shops. IDC, ever quick to offer obvious comments without facts to substantiate the assertion, is right there. Why? Maybe IDC sells professional services to IBM?
Where are the revenue reports which substantiate Watson’s market success? Where are substantive case examples from major firms? Where is a public demonstration of Watson using Wikipedia information?
Think about these questions as you sip your cheap 7-11 coffee, gentle reader.
Ponder that there may be nothing substantive to report, so I learn about unmanned coffee shops unable to figure out who bought what without IBM Watson. Overkill? Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, June 19, 2015
Enterprise Search and Marketers: Think Endpoint Computing
April 9, 2015
I have to hand it to the mid tier consultants. Just when I thought the baloney about enterprise search had begun to recede, I learned I was wrong. That puts me in my place.
Search is now “endpoint computing.” I know this because I received an email from the incubator-spawned X1 search company. I have tested X1 over the years, and I have come to think neutral thoughts about the company’s administrative options and its interface.
The method of communicating with me was a somewhat dry email that began with the salutation, “Hello.”
The email offered me a report by the ever fascinating Gartner Group. The point of the email is that X1 is a cool vendor. That’s nice. Curious I clicked on the link and was redirected to this page:
Okay, a lead generating system. I filled out the information and then I received another email. This one was a bit more serious.
The author, an earnest person named “Janice” wanted to speak with me to discuss my search requirement. Furthermore the person looks forward to speaking with me about “unified search and discovery for virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments.” X1 was founded in 2003and has experienced several management changes, which is common in the “unified search and discovery for virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments” market.
What makes X1 cool? To answer the question I had to read the Gartner Report, a task which I know is a chore.
The idea is that search is now endpoint computing. Okay. I guess. The report reassures me that the information in the report is not an “exhaustive list of vendors.” That’s good because in the report there are five companies mentioned:
- Login Consultants, a workspace consultant, but I don’t know what this term means
- Tanium, a company offering endpoint security and systems management, which strikes me as a consulting outfit
- X1, a search and retrieval vendor offering desktop search, eDiscovery, and enterprise search
- Kaviza (a where are they now company which puzzles me) a virtualized desktop outfit now owned by Citrix
- Framehawk (another where are they outfit), a company in the high definition user experience business (I have no idea what this means). Apparently Citrix does because Citrix also acquired Framehawk.
Quite an eclectic list. I remember when I worked at Ziff Communications in Manhattan. I listened to a group of editors working up a list of top trends over lunch. So much for methodology. The approach produced a somewhat eclectic list which was, in my opinion, of little value. The list was silly. But these were professionals. Who was I?
So the Gartner list is neither exhaustive nor coherent from my point of view.
What’s cool about X1 search as endpoint computing?
According to the mid tier consulting firms’ authors, X1 is cool because:
“Implementing VDI that provides a user experience that’s equal or superior to a distributed PC environment has been a huge challenge for organizations. While much of the innovation in the VDI space over the past few years has been focused on reducing cost and complexity, some vendors, like X1, have concentrated on removing barriers or exceptions that make VDI a compromise rather than a business enabler.” (page 3)
In the context of the firms profiled by Gartner’s “expert, the explanation of the X1 cool factor baffles me. I am not confused. I just don’t know what Gartner is trying to communicate.
I have several thoughts running through my head:
First, Gartner obviously has a financial model in place that makes it possible for the mid tier consulting firm to crank out analyses that seem to be authoritative. On closer inspection, the terminology and the information provided are not particularly useful. Does Gartner write these for free and allow the “cool” vendors to distribute these analyses for free? Why do I get a copy for free? Hmmm.
Second, there are obviously companies which value the Gartner endorsement even if it is not exactly clear what the message is. These companies—specifically X1—have seized upon the Gartner report as a way to generate leads and sales. I have no problem with that, but sending information that makes sense would appeal to me more than what I perceive as “information free” commentary.
Third, I continue to worry about the chance for meaningful discourse about the relative merits of information retrieval systems. The presentation of vendors in the context of buzzwords does little to convince me of the merits of X1 or the credibility of Gartner Group. I suppose that is why there are blue chip consulting firms and mid tier (azure chip) consulting firms. One good point: Unlike IDC’s Dave Schubmehl, the report was not $3,500 available on Amazon with my name slapped on as the “author.”
Score one for Gartner’s merrie band.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2015
Hidden Value Oxymoron: Another Me Too Webinar?
April 2, 2015
Look what I received in my email on April Fool’s Day.
I know zero about direct marketing. It did cross my mind that when sending out content marketing spam, one should make sure the message does not appear as a spoof. “Hidden value.” Okay.
I also wondered why IDC and BA Insight would want me to attend a webinar when I have been an outspoken critic of webinars and mid tier consulting companies recycle my content without bothering to issue a contract, pay for rights, or make sure I am okay with the pricing and the method of selling. I don’t want my content on Amazon, a company focused on offering one button ordering of laundry detergent, thank you.
Mid tier consultancies and their experts are another kettle of fish from an unregistered trawler operating near Samut Sakhon, Thailand.
This buzzword filled marketing spam is an invitation to yet another advertising webinar. The company footing the bill is BA Insight, which is one of the SharePoint centric search vendors working to generate sufficient revenue to keep its stakeholders calm and carrying on. The best way to achieve sales, it appears, is to pay IDC’s “search expert” to explain the value of hidden information. Oh, yes. The value of hidden information. There is gold in them thar hills.
If you are not familiar with IDC and information, may I point you to this item about IDC’s Dave Schubmehl. You may also find this article mildly amusing: Meme of the Moment.
Keep in mind when you listen to this infomercial that IDC and Mr. Schubmehl sold my content on Amazon without my permission. I buy from Amazon. I don’t sell via Amazon. My legal eagle managed to get the $3,500 eight page document out of the Amazon store. I make my information somewhat more affordable. CyberOSINT is only $99 with the offer code LEA99. That’s a good price for an original chunk of work. The Amazon $3,500 eight page item is, even with my name on it, a pretty crazy play for cash. Maybe an adventuresome five year old might fall for the $3,500 price tag. I would not.
How much of the information in this BA Insight infomercial will be recycled? How much of the information will be of “value”? Well, sign up and drink deep of the Pierian spring.
Remember: If products are not advertised, products may not sell. If products do not sell, there is no money to pay back investors keeping outfits in business. Without business, the mid tier consultants will get fired. Money is what’s important.
Value? Hmm. Good question when experts who use other individuals’ information are the “talent” on a Web infused late night infomercial. Why not hire Guthy Renker and get the job done in a manner that can be measured. Talk about value is not value. Remember. Eight pages of stuff with my name on it was only $3,500.
Such a deal. Ah, the power of presumptive management and challenged search vendors. Why not invite me. I just love this content marketing, webinar, value, best practice fluff.
Note: I almost wrote, “Don’t fail to miss it.” I did not.
Stephen E Arnold, April 2, 2015
Great Moments in Mid Tier Consulting: The Apple Watch
March 21, 2015
Short honk: I couldn’t resist. I read “Apple Watch Is Like an Invasive Weed Says Gartner.” The idea is that Apple identifies a market (an ecosystem) and then acts like kudzu or a killer carp. Here’s a passage from the Register I highlighted:
Hetu [a Gartner “expert”] says Apple Pay and the Apple Watch are Cupertino’s new invaders, with the latter gadget set to “further revolutionize how consumers are influenced to purchase and their paths to making purchases.”
Colorful. Now let’s see if the Apple Watch is digital kudzu. I know that Gartner has one English major operating as a “search expert.” It seems another Gartner “wizard” is vying for the moniker of “Chief Metaphorist.”
Kudzu is a good way to characterize the thinking of mid tier consulting firms desperate to close deals, keep their jobs, and forget that outfits like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG may be out of reach. A happy quack to King County Government for the image.
Well, if it sells work to those with cash. More power to the mid tier crowd. (Will Dave Schubmehl, who sold a report with my name on it for $3,500 on Amazon, and his cohorts at IDC move beyond recycling and into the realm of poetry?)
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2015
The Fraying of the GOOG: Blogger and Gmail Autocomplete
February 24, 2015
I love the GOOG. The only thing I love more is an expert who resells my content on Amazon without my permission. Yep, I remember the Dave Schubmehl adventure. I think of IDC and I think of fraying or bad intellectual tailoring.
To the business at hand. I noted two items in my Overflight round up this morning. Both of these suggest that some of the wonderfulness of Google may be fraying. You know. Fraying. Like the cuff of my too long exercise pants. The pants are perfectly okay for the gym. Just fraying.
The first item points out that the GOOG is trimming unsavory images from its blogging service. The details appear in “Adult Content Po9licy on Blogger.” Google bought Blogger a decade ago. Quick reaction time I suppose. I am okay with editorial policies for content. But 11 years?
The second item to a function that many love. I absolutely loathe it, however. Start typing and the system fills in what you mean. Well, what the algorithm calculates you mean. Navigate to “A Weird Gmail Bug Has Tons of People Sending Emails to the Wrong Contacts.” The rip in the tightly spun Google technical fabric is, according to the write up:
Google’s mail service seems to have a bug in its auto-suggest feature that’s causing a bunch of people to send messages to the wrong contacts. Instead of auto-completing to the most-used contact when people start typing a name into the “To” field, it seems to be prioritizing contacts that they communicate with less frequently.
What am I to make of decisions a decade in the making and upside down algorithms? Maybe fraying. You know. Good for the gym but I wouldn’t wear the pants to a funeral.
Stephen E Arnold, February 24, 2015
Attivio: New, New, New after $70 Million and Seven Years
February 7, 2015
With new senior managers and a hunt on for a new director of financial services, Attivio is definitely trying to shake ‘em up. I received some public relations spam about the most recent version of the Attivio system. The approach combines open source software with home brew code, an increasingly popular way to sell licenses, consulting, and services. To top it off, Attivio is an outfit that has the “best company culture” and Dave Schubmehl’s IDC report about Attivio with my name on it available for free. This was a $3,500 item on Amazon earlier this year. Now. Free.
Attivio’s February 3, 2015, news release explains that Attivio is in the enterprise search business. You can read the presser at this link. Not too long ago, Attivio was asserting that it was the solution to some business intelligence woes. I suppose search and business intelligence are related, but “real” intelligence requires more than keyword search and a report capability.
The release explains that Attivio is—I find this fascinating—“reinventing Big Data Search and Dexterity.” Not bad for open source, home brew, and Fast Search & Technology flavoring. Search and dexterity. Definitely a Google Adword keeper.
Attivio’s presser says:
Attivio 4.3 delivers new functionality and improvements that make it dramatically easier to build, deploy, and manage contextually relevant applications that drive revolutionary insight. Companies with structured and unstructured data in disparate silos can now quickly gain immediate access to all information with universal contextual enrichment, all delivered from Attivio’s agile enterprise platform.
I like “revolutionary insight.” Keep in mind that Attivio was formed by former Fast Search & Transfer executives in 2007 and has ingested, according to Crunchbase, $71.1 million in seven years. That works out to $10 million per year to do various technical things and sell products and services to generate money.
More significant to me than money that may be difficult or impossible to repay with a hefty uptick is that in seven years, Attivio has released four versions of its flagship software. With open source providing a chunk of functionality, it strikes me that Attivio may be lagging behind the development curve of some other companies in the content processing sector. But with advisors like Dave Schubmehl and his colleagues, the pace of innovation is likely to be explained as just wonderful. At Cambridge University, one researcher pointed out that work done in 2014 is essentially part of ancient history. There is perhaps a difference between Cambridge in the UK and Cambridge in Massachusetts.
What does Attivo 4.3 offer as “key features”? Here’s what the news release offers:
- ASAP: Attivio Search Application Platform – a simple, intuitive user interface for non-technical users building search-based applications;
- SAIL: Search Analytics Interactive Layer – offers more robust functionality and an enhanced user experience;
- Advanced Entity Extraction: New machine-learning based entity extraction module enriches content with higher accuracy and improved disambiguation, enabling deeper discovery and providing a smart alternative to managing entity dictionaries;
- Simplified Management: Empowers business users to handle documents and manage settings in a code-free environment;
- Composite Documents: Unique ability to search across document fragments optimized to deliver sub-second response times;
- New Designer Tools: Simplifies Attivio management through Visual Workflow and Component Editors, enables all users to design and build custom processing logic in an integrated UI.
There are a couple of important features that are available in other vendors’ systems; for example, geographic functions, automated real-time content collection, automated content analytics, and automated outputs to a range of devices, humans, or other systems.
The notion of ASAP and SAIL are catchy acronyms, but I find them less than satisfying. The entity extraction function is interesting but there is no detail about how it works in languages other than Roman based character sets, how the system deals with variants, and how the system maps one version of an entity to another in content that is either static imagery or video.
I am not sure what a composite document is. If a document contains images and videos, what does the system do with these content objects. If the document is an XML representation, what’s the time penalty to convert content objects to well formed XML? With interfaces becoming the new black, Attivio is closing the gap with the Endeca interface toolkit. Endeca dates from the late 1990s and has blazed a trail through the same marketing jungle that Attivio is now retracing.
For more information about Attivio, visit the company’s Web site at www.attivio.com. The company will be better equipped to explain virtual, enterprise search, big data, and the company’s financial posture than I.
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2015
Autonomy: Leading the Push Beyond Enterprise Search
January 30, 2015
In “CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access,” I describe Autonomy’s math-first approach to content processing. The reason is that after the veil of secrecy was lifted with regard to the signal processing`methods used for British intelligence tasks, Cambridge University became one of the hot beds for the use of Bayesian, LaPlacian, and Markov methods. These numerical recipes proved to be both important and controversial. Instead of relying on manual methods, humans selected training sets, tuned the thresholds, and then turned the smart software loose. Math is not required to understand what Autonomy packaged for commercial use: Signal processing separated noise in a channel and allowed software to process the important bits. Thank you, Claude Shannon and the good Reverend Bayes.
What did Autonomy receive for this breakthrough? Not much but the company did generate more than $600 million in revenues about 10 years after opening for business. As far as I know, no other content processing vendor has reached this revenue target. Endeca, for the sake of comparison, flat lined at about $130 million in the year that Oracle bought the Guided Navigation outfit for about $1.0 billion.
For one thing the British company BAE (British Aerospace Engineering) licensed the Autonomy system and began to refine its automated collection, analysis, and report systems. So what? The UK became by the late 1990s the de facto leader in automated content activities. Was BAE the only smart outfit in the late 1990s? Nope, there were other outfits who realized the value of the Autonomy approach. Examples range from US government entities to little known outfits like the Wynyard Group.
In the CyberOSINT volume, you can get more detail about why Autonomy was important in the late 1990s, including the name of the university8 professor who encouraged Mike Lynch to make contributions that have had a profound impact on intelligence activities. For color, let me mention an anecdote that is not in the 176 page volume. Please, keep in mind that Autonomy was, like i2 (another Cambridge University spawned outfit) a client prior to my retirement.) IBM owns i2 and i2 is profiled in CyberOSINT in Chapter 5, “CyberOSINT Vendors.” I would point out that more than two thirds of the monograph contains information that is either not widely available or not available via a routine Bing, Google, or Yandex query. For example, Autonomy does not make publicly available a list of its patent documents. These contain specific information about how to think about cyber OSINT and moving beyond keyword search.
Some Color: A Conversation with a Faux Expert
In 2003 I had a conversation with a fellow who was an “expert” in content management, a discipline that is essentially a step child of database technology. I want to mention this person by name, but I will avoid the inevitable letter from his attorney rattling a saber over my head. This person publishes reports, engages in litigation with his partners, kowtows to various faux trade groups, and tries to keep secret his history as a webmaster with some Stone Age skills.
Not surprisingly this canny individual had little good to say about Autonomy. The information I provided about the Lynch technology, its applications, and its importance in next generation search were dismissed with a comment I will not forget, “Autonomy is a pile of crap.”
Okay, that’s an informed opinion for a clueless person pumping baloney about the value of content management as a separate technical field. Yikes.
In terms of enterprise search, Autonomy’s competitors criticized Lynch’s approach. Instead of a keyword search utility that was supposed to “unlock” content, Autonomy delivered a framework. The framework operated in an automated manner and could deliver keyword search, point and click access like the Endeca system, and more sophisticated operations associated with today’s most robust cyber OSINT solutions. Enterprise search remains stuck in the STAIRS III and RECON era. Autonomy was the embodiment of the leap from putting the burden of finding on humans to shifting the load to smart software.
A diagram from Autonomy’s patents filed in 2001. What’s interesting is that this patent cites an invention by Dr. Liz Liddy with whom the ArnoldIT team worked in the late 1990s. A number of content experts understood the value of automated methods, but Autonomy was the company able to commercialize and build a business on technology that was not widely known 15 years ago. Some universities did not teach Bayesian and related methods because these were tainted by humans who used judgments to set certain thresholds. See US 6,668,256. There are more than 100 Autonomy patent documents. How many of the experts at IDC, Forrester, Gartner, et al have actually located the documents, downloaded them, and reviewed the systems, methods, and claims? I would suggest a tiny percentage of the “experts.” Patent documents are not what English majors are expected to read.”
That’s important and little appreciated by the mid tier outfits’ experts working for IDC (yo, Dave Schubmehl, are you ramping up to recycle the NGIA angle yet?) Forrester (one of whose search experts told me at a MarkLogic event that new hires for search were told to read the information on my ArnoldIT.com Web site like that was a good thing for me), Gartner Group (the conference and content marketing outfit), Ovum (the UK counterpart to Gartner), and dozens of other outfits who understand search in terms of selling received wisdom, not insight or hands on facts.
Enterprise Search Lacks NGIA Functions
January 29, 2015
Users Want More Than Hunting through a Rubbish
CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access is, according to Ric Manning, the publisher of Stephen E Arnold’s new study, is now available. You can order a copy at the Gumroad online store or via the link on Xenky.com.
One of the key chapters in the 176 page study of information retrieval solution that move beyond search takes you under the hood of an NGIA system. Without reproducing the 10 page chapter and its illustrations, I want to highlight two important aspects of NGIA systems.
When a person requires information under time pressure, traditional systems pose a problem. The time required to figure out which repository to query, craft a query or take a stab at what “facet” (category) may contain the information, scanning the outputs the system displays, opening a document that appears to be related to the query, and then figuring out exactly what item of data is the one required makes traditional search a non starter in many work situations. The bottleneck is the human’s ability to keep track of which digital repository contains what. Many organizations have idiosyncratic terminology, and users in one department may not be familiar with the terminology used in another unit of the organization.
Register for the seminar on the Telestrategies’ Web site.
Traditional enterprise search systems trip and skin their knees over the time issue and over the “locate what’s needed issue.” These are problems that have persisted in search box oriented systems since the days of RECON, SDC Orbit, and Dialcom. There is little a manager can do to create more time. Time is a very valuable commodity and it often determines what type of decision is made and how risk laden that decision may be.
There is also little one can do to change how a bright human works with a system that forces a busy individual to perform iterative steps that often amount to guessing the word or phrase to unlock what’s hidden in an index or indexes.
Little wonder that convincing a customer to license a traditional keyword system continue to bedevil vendors.
A second problem is the nature of access. There is news floating around that Facebook has been able to generate more ad growth than Google because Facebook has more mobile users. Whether Facebook or Google dominates social mobile, the key development is “mobile.” Works need information access from devices which have smaller and different form factors from the multi core, 3.5 gigahertz, three screen workstation I am using to write this blog post.
Worlds Apart: The Schism between Information Access and OId School Keyword Search
January 9, 2015
Ah, Dave Schubmehl. You may remember my adventures with this “expert” in search. He published four reports based on my research, and then without permission sold one of these recycled $3,500 gems on Amazon. A sharp eyed law librarian and my attorney were able to get this cat back into the back.
He’s back with a 22 page report “The Knowledge Quotient: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information Using Search and Content Analytics” that is free. Yep, free.
I was offered this report at a Yahoo email address I use to gather the spam and content marketing fluff that floods to me each day. I received the spam from Alisa Lipzen, an inside sales representative, of Coveo. Ms. Lipzen is sufficiently familiar with me to call me “Ben”. That’s a familiarity that may be unwarranted. She wants me to “enjoy.” Okay, but how about some substance.
To put this report in perspective, it is free. To me this means that the report was written for Coveo (a SharePoint centric keyword search vendor) and Lexalytics (a unit of Infonic if this IDC item is accurate). IDC, in my view, was paid to write this report and then cooperated with Coveo and Lexalytics to pump out the document as useful information.
My interest is not in the content marketing and pay-for-fame methods of consulting firms and their clients. Nope. I am focused on the substance of the write up which I was able to download thanks to the link in the spam I received. Here’s the cover page.
For background, I have just finished CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access. Fresh in my mind are the findings from our original and objective research. That’s right. I funded the research and I did not seek compensation from any of the 21 companies profiled in the report. You can read about the monograph on my Xenky site.
What’s interesting to me is that the IDC “expert” generated marketing document misses the major shift that has taken place in information access.
Keyword search is based on looking at what happened. That’s the historical bias of looking for content that has been processed and indexed. One can sift through that index and look for words that suggest happiness or dissatisfaction. That’s the “sentiment” angle.
But these methods are retrospective.
As CyberOSINT points out the new approach that is gaining customers and the support of a number of companies like BAE and Google is forward looking.
One looks up information when one knows what one is seeking. But what does the real time flow of information mean for now and the next 24 hours or week. The difference is one that is now revolutionizing information access and putting old school vendors at a disadvantage.
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